


Like Lightning in a Bottle

by Ellerigby13



Series: Darcy Lewis Bingo 2020 [2]
Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Avengers Tower, BAMF Darcy Lewis, F/M, Hurt Clint Barton, Idiots in Love, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25681288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellerigby13/pseuds/Ellerigby13
Summary: Heimdall’s eyes flashed, a shiver bunching the muscles in his shoulders that had little to do with the vacuous coldness of outer space.  In his mind’s eye, he could see the great tree of Yggdrasil fluttering its leaves as it shook in the winds of Ragnarok’s aftermath.Thousands of lightyears away, Darcy Lewis’s laptop went completely blank.Or, Darcy gains the powers of Thor, and may be slowly but surely falling for our favorite mess of an archer.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton/Darcy Lewis, Jane Foster & Darcy Lewis
Series: Darcy Lewis Bingo 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1851811
Comments: 20
Kudos: 174
Collections: Darcy Lewis Bingo





	Like Lightning in a Bottle

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so...  
> This fic borrows from a bunch of different Marvel canons and disregards a lot of different canons too. Essentially, Clint is comics!Clint, the events from The Avengers and Ragnarok happened, and bits and pieces of CA:TWS happened as well (meaning, we get Sam and Bucky, but Bucky is accepted as a member of the team instead of being on the run, and HYDRA is back in the spotlight). These plot points are mostly minor, so we can mostly focus on our two dorks falling slowly in love. So long as you're willing to accept the wonderful world of Avengers Tower, hopefully you'll enjoy this too :)  
> Bingo fill for Darcy Lewis Bingo 2020 square: D3 - High Voltage

Heimdall’s eyes flashed, a shiver bunching the muscles in his shoulders that had little to do with the vacuous coldness of outer space. Thor turned to his dear friend, sensing that  _ something _ was wrong, but Heimdall made no noise. In his mind’s eye, more intuition than vision itself, he could see the great tree of Yggdrasil fluttering its leaves as it shook in the winds of Ragnarok’s aftermath.

Something was about to change.

Thousands of lightyears away, Darcy Lewis’s laptop went completely blank.

“Fuck,” she huffed, and opened up the battery pack to take a look at her motherboard. Surprisingly, the insides of her computer looked like they’d been fried. “What the  _ fuck _ ?”

“Oh God.” Jane was over her shoulder a half a second later, her eyebrows knitting together in the middle. “What just happened?”

“I don’t know? I didn’t spill anything, I didn’t overheat it…” She ran her fingers over the corners of the keyboard to find cracks, any evidence of some issue that would cause the PC to up and take a shit like it had.

A thinly veiled layer of panic seeped into Jane’s voice. “This isn’t the one with our anti-matter data, is it?” Before Darcy could answer, Jane began to reach across her to push the screen back -

And then yanked her hand back to her chest as though she’d been burned.

Darcy’s eyes widened, for a crackling blue stream of light had connected the two of them for a split second, a stream of light that had looked and felt like electricity.

She slammed her laptop shut and got to her feet, finding her way to the floor-length window at the north end of their office at the Greek university where Jane and Erik had just gotten their grant, and lifted her head to search the skies for any sign of Thor, clouds, thunderstorms.

The heavens were as clear and blue as they’d been the whole day.

“It was static,” she explained, more to herself than to anyone else who might have been around to hear her. “Static...because...there might be a storm on the horizon?”

As far as she tried to look, blue melted into blue with the tameness of the ocean to meet the sky. No clouds, no storm, no Thor.

The entire lab, for that matter, was untouched by humidity or static, everything except Darcy’s laptop.

“Maybe it’s a sign.” Jane inhaled deeply, scanning the meager work that she’d completed for the day, papers loaded with equations that meant very little to Darcy but that had evidently meant a standstill for Jane’s research. “We should...take a break. Or something.”

Her eyes flitted up to Darcy, who’d wondered when the day would come that Jane would ever be the one to ask for a break. She couldn’t clearly make out the expression on Jane’s face, but there was more to it than the exhaustion of her research.

“Okay,” Darcy said, if only to placate her best friend, now that something in her bones had grown restless and confused. She felt like a whole hive of bees had been unleashed in her stomach. “Maybe we could...go for a walk?”

Darcy didn’t know what to talk about, apart from the fact that her laptop had evidently electrocuted itself and that she’d almost electrocuted Jane, as the two of them closed up their office to explore the confines of the rather small campus until they reached the docks. Darcy warily eyed the houseboat that Erik had invested in the moment he’d heard they were going to Greece, and the greenish-blue slapping of the water against its hull.

Jane hesitated a step from the creaking boards that led to the houseboat. “Do you...maybe want to wait out here?”

She’d made it through the whole campus, passed through metal doorways and everything, without anything else sparky happening. But all this was probably not worth the risk of electrocuting a whole ocean-ful of fish and coral and dolphins.

Erik came out behind Jane wearing the Hawaiian shirt and shorts combination that he’d become accustomed to in the Mediterranean, a quizzical look on his face as he took in...Darcy, wearing a set of clothes that was no more remarkable than her usual getup, swinging her hands at her sides because she didn’t know what else to do with them. He glanced at Jane, back to Darcy, and, frowning, retreated into his houseboat, reappearing with a small object in his hand. 

A lightbulb.

“Erik, this is ridiculous, come  _ on _ ,” she began to say, as Selvig held it out to her, the metal foot of it extended. 

“Humor me?” His eyebrows were raised, like he wasn’t exactly inclined to believe it either, but still he held it between them, waiting only for her touch.

When Darcy pressed her finger to the silver tip of the metal, the coils in the bulb flashed bright yellow.

* * *

“Emergency meeting in ten, Birdman. We’re gonna need you outta the rafters soon as you can come down,” chirped Tony’s voice from Clint’s earpiece. The latter lifted his arms in a prolonged stretch, feeling the familiar crunch of his vertebrae cracking into place. Fuck, was he on the wrong side of thirty.

“What’s the emergency, Stark? You lose a private jet or somethin’?”

Today had been long enough already - he’d been sucker punched by a robbery suspect in Midtown, gotten laughed at by Nat for being caught off-guard, and found out the next season of his favorite Netflix show had been delayed another couple of months for reshoots. He didn’t  _ want _ to go to an emergency meeting, he wanted to pick up a steaming pastrami sandwich from his favorite deli, go home to his shabby little apartment in Brooklyn, and let Lucky slobber on him in bed while he watched reruns of The Great British Bake Off.

“Har har har...Thor and Bruce are back - with the rest of Asgard.”

“Asgard?”

The elevator trip up to the conference room felt long and twitchy, partially because no one had seen Bruce or Thor in the last few years, and partially because he knew that with Asgard came the unspoken promise of Loki - whom Clint was still, after all these years, ready to strangle with the damn shirt off his back if that was all he had.

He didn’t have much time to think about all the ways he might murder Loki while Thor wasn’t looking before a familiar pair of basketball-sized biceps curled around him, squeezing every oxygen molecule out of his lungs.

“The Hawkeye!” Thor roared, and as he let go Clint felt his ribcage settle back into place. The biceps were the only part of him that was even vaguely familiar; he looked like he’d been through the mill with a buzzcut and a brand spanking new eyepatch. It was unfair that Thor could still be a grade-A beefcake even all raggedy. Clint’s brand of raggedy got him unpleasant stares on the subway. Nat smirked at him from her place at the table beside Sam. “It is good to see you, dear friend - please, make acquaintance with Heimdall and the Valkyrie, my most trusted compatriots from Asgard.”

Heimdall, the tall, dark-skinned man with long dreadlocks and dazzling golden eyes, sent him a thin-lipped smile and a polite nod. Valkyrie, on the other hand, did little more than survey him through the blue tattooing down her face, nothing in her expression to indicate friendliness or hostility. He’d seen that look on Natasha an uncomfortable amount of times.

“Bruce,” Clint said eventually, his hand hanging between them before Bruce took it and shook, looking somehow both exhausted and sheepish.

Tony cleared his throat, having kicked his feet up onto the dark, polished table, leaning back in his office chair. He sent Clint an exasperated look through his sunglasses, one that humbly requested they get done with the pleasantries and get down to business.

“Where’s the rest of Asgard?” Clint asked, as he found his place on the other side of Nat, realizing that the only strangers to the Tower today were the ones Thor had just introduced him to.

Thor pressed his lips into a grim smile. “Settling into New Asgard as we speak. We have made a valuable ally in the ocean man Namor - he is helping us establish a home since ours has been destroyed.”

“Destroyed?” Steve repeated, frowning.

Heimdall straightened to his full height. “Hela Odinsdottir laid siege to Asgard and murdered a great number of our people. When Ragnarok began with the great giant Surtur sowing the fires of Muspell in our land, his power was able to defeat Hela and her wrath, but it made of our home a wasteland. We seek refuge on Midgard, at least until we may find a new home of our own.”

“There’s more,” the Valkyrie announced, her eyes darting quickly to Heimdall. “Tell them what you saw. Of Yggdrasil.”

Tony frowned. “Yggdrasil? The...life tree? Connects our realms, and all that?” Natasha shot him a look of surprise, at which he shrugged. “What? I read.”

“Yes.” Heimdall’s grave expression matched the deep concern of his tone. “It appears that the Nine Realms have deemed a mortal on Midgard worthy of the powers of Thor.”

The room went quiet for a moment. Clint blinked, as if by clearing his eyes he could make sense of what Heimdall had said. As usual, Tony was the first one to speak.

“Is that why you’re missing your hammer?”

Thor’s smile turned genuine. “No. Hela destroyed Mjolnir before Ragnarok began. My own powers remain with me, but Heimdall has reason to believe that Midgard now has two gods of thunder. Myself, and my dear friend Darcy Lewis.”

Everyone went quiet again. This time, Clint spoke up first.

“Who?”

Darcy Lewis, it turned out, ran with Jane Foster, Thor’s ex, and Erik Selvig, who Clint had become very acquainted with at the old SHIELD compound a few years back. And more importantly, Clint realized, once she arrived at the Tower, she was a  _ massive _ pain in the ass.

A few weeks later when Tony and Bruce were running tests on her in the lab and Clint had dropped by to swipe some of the snacks that Tony usually left lying around, she flashed him a cautious smile, twiddling with the hem of the soft blue Golden Girls shirt she had on.

“So is it, like, super- _ sight _ that you have, or what?” she asked him, swinging her legs back and forth from her spot on top of the lab table.

“Yeah, Barton, remind me what your power is again?” Tony grinned over his bag of veggie sticks.

“The super-ability to murder you with my eyes closed,” Clint deadpanned, yanking open the top drawer of Tony’s desk and, finding it snackless, slamming it shut again to yank open the middle one. “You got anything sour, Stark? Lucky made off with my rainbow strips again.”

“There’s a kitchen in the lounge, isn’t there?” Darcy winced at the stethoscope Bruce had brought close to her, a few blue sparks zapping between the metal and her back. “Also, why did you let your  _ dog _ eat all your sour candy?”

“I didn’t  _ let _ him do shit,” Clint protested, while Tony snickered in the corner. “He’s a dog who lives in a Manhattan apartment, he gets up to trouble sometimes.”

“Why don’t you bring him to the Tower? There’s plenty of space for him to explore here, and I’m sure we’ve got plenty of interns or workers’ kids who would be down to walk him for a little extra cash.”

“Do I look like I’m made of money, Lewis?” He gestured to the hole in his sweats, and probably the general fact that he was raiding Tony’s desk for snacks instead of buying his own.

“No, but he does,” she said, flicking her eyes toward Tony.

“Goddess of Electricity has a point, Barton.” Tony extended his fist to her, and the utter glee on Darcy’s face as she bumped it with her own made Clint want to hurl all over the lab floor. “Speaking of, you think of a superhero name? Or you wanna let the public make one up for you, after you and Thor work on controlling all the static?”

“The Human Taser,” Darcy suggested, after thinking about it for all of two seconds. Clint finally stalked out in defeat, empty-handed.

The last thing he heard Tony say before the door swung shut behind him was a very scandalized, “Absolutely  _ not _ .”

* * *

Nat had perched herself on the armrest of his couch, one hand scratching at the spot behind Lucky’s ears that made him go positively gaga, the other propping up the enormous slice of pizza they’d ordered from their usual place on the corner. “Really? The worst thing she said to you was to bring this big guy to work?”

“She’s insufferable,” Clint grumbled, muffled by the mouthful of hot cheese and sauce he was nursing. “All these stupid, know-it-all questions to make me look dumb.”

Nat gave him the deadest stare he’d ever seen. “You do a great job of that on your own, you know.”

He rolled his eyes. “Thanks for that.”

She shrugged. “Is it possible that you’re feeling...threatened?”

“By the Human Taser? Come on.” While the Thor powers were admittedly pretty goddamn cool, she wasn’t exactly threatening yet - she could make sparks and hover off the ground a little, but the full-on lightning and flying and hammer-wielding were a long ways away. Thor had been training her in their upstate facility for the last few days, which meant that Clint didn’t have to be subject to her presence for a short time. Didn’t have to be terrorized by her curves like a highway or the sloping pink lines of her lips or her soft blue eyes.

While he got lost in his thoughts for a second, Nat’s mouth turned up in a knowing smile. “Do you  _ like  _ her?”

Clint froze mid-bite, and made a face. “Nat. Come  _ on _ .”

“You bring her up every time we talk, Barton.”

Before he could even think about how many times he mentioned her, his face went painfully hot. Nat only smiled wider. “Stop that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He stayed silent as she finished munching. “What is it, then? The long, dark hair, or her sweet baby blues, or the fact that she takes the trouble to out-snark you and Tony both?”

It wasn’t that she out-snarked him, he reasoned with himself. It was that she could say anything to him, rude or cutting or too close to the point - not that she ever did, she was too  _ sweet _ for that - and he’d probably thank her. And on top of it, not a whole lot of people liked engaging with the non sequitur parts of his humor, the ones that he thought were the funniest, and she...had been one of very few around the Tower who was willing to indulge him.

He met Natasha’s eye, his heart much too high in his throat. “No.”

“Or that she’s always talking about your favorite movies, even when she doesn’t know they’re your favorite movies?”

“ _ Die Hard _ is objectively a good movie, all that means is she has half-decent taste.”

But the damage was done. She was grinning like the damn Cheshire Cat, just dumping salt in his wounds. He might as well have had a space heater sitting on his neck.

“If you speak even one word, Nat…”

She tore off a piece of her crust with her teeth and chomped slowly at him, her cheeks bulging almost comically with every bounce of her jaw. “Clint, I’m a spy, for God’s sake. You think I don’t  _ already _ know all your secrets?”

* * *

Darcy returned with Thor a couple of days later, looking like she’d been through the ringer. Thor was too proud and polite to say that she’d done any less than fantastic - behind his back, Darcy shook her head dully.

“C’mon,” Clint teased, as cross-legged as he could go on the tiny stools in the lab level where she worked. “You must’ve done  _ some  _ sparky stuff, huh? Human Taser and all that.”

She glanced up, a pained expression on her pretty face, from the balance support she was holding together with Bruce as Tony stacked something that looked like a very high tech piece of gear onto the top and then screwed it down into place. “Do we need to talk about that right now?”

He shrugged. “What’s a good time for you?”

A soft huff escaped her lips, and Tony had murder on his face, only he was too concentrated to do anything about it. “Anytime that I’m not holding super delicate science equipment, preferably, Clint.”

He waited until the three of them exhaled, their tower-looking-thing apparently as complete as it would be for now. She propped her hands on her hips and waited for him to resume. Clint clicked the heels of his second favorite pair of Chuck Taylors together.

“You like coffee, Lewis?”

Both her eyebrows lifted. “Yes?”

He scooted his butt off the stool, getting to his feet with a hand on the back of his neck. “Cool. See you around.”

Clint waylaid himself with work, talking to Maria Hill about some security measure or another, shooting Barnes finger guns in the hallway, sparring with Nat, anything that took up a spare moment that he’d be using to agonize over what kind of coffee Darcy would want, if she drank her coffee black or if she liked Pumpkin Spice Lattes, which Nat swore on, for some reason. 

By the time that he made it all the way down to the best cafe in the building and back to the lab, Bruce and Tony were out, it looked like, for the rest of the day. The sky had gone a soft orange through the west-facing windows, and Darcy looked like she was clearing up for the evening. Clint shouldered open the door, careful not to spill the iced coffees he’d brought (he figured iced coffee was probably a safe bet, a happy medium between PSL and an untouched brew) and smiled at her when she looked up.

“Now a better time?”

She looked down at the cup he was offering her, her eyes narrowed as she took it. “Don’t you have badly dressed supervillains to harass with a one-liner?”

He tried to control his face when her fingers brushed against his. “Nah, that’s Stark’s job. How’d things go with Thor?”

She slid onto her stool, leaning against the desk behind her. “Could’ve been better. But, uh...I  _ did _ make one bolt of lightning.”

Clint smiled, closing his lips around the dark blue paper straw. “One more bolt of lightning than I can make. That’s progress.”

Darcy looked into her cup, a cautious look on her face that didn’t seem to have much to do with what was in it, and sipped long and slow. “Not where I should be, after getting these powers out of nowhere. I’ve been on this track for...the last six weeks now? And...I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem good enough.”

He found a spot on the stool beside her, and crossed his ankles. “None of us  _ really _ became who we were overnight. I mean, even Steve still forgets sometimes that he’s got shoulders like a frickin’ Mack Truck - just last week, he was runnin’ into a building to save some kids and accidentally took out the drywall with his elbow - didn’t realize it was so close. Till a couple years ago, he was about your height, ninety pounds.”

Something like a laugh came out of those soft berry lips, and when he mustered up the balls to look her in the face again, she was smiling softly, her cheeks an unbearable shade of pink. “You’ve been doin’ this pretty much your whole life, huh?”

“Not my  _ whole _ life.” For a moment, his father’s face and belt flashed before his eyes, and he remembered the man who’d come to be a second father, ushering him under the big, striped tent with hands that were both calloused and warm. “I got brought up by a guy who wasn’t the most responsible dad. Put any kind of projectile in my hand and asked me to throw it at a target, sometimes for hours, until I could get it right ten times in a row. And then twenty times in a row. He used to tell me, ‘Barton, if you can do it perfect once, you can do it perfect a hundred times.’ It took me years of practice to get it perfect a hundred times.” He nudged her with his arm, trying to excuse the sparks he felt when her skin touched his. “Even though you mighta gotten the process sped up a little, it’s gonna take more than a couple weeks to be as good as you can.”

“Thanks,” she said, her head dipping down to her chest. She went quiet for a second, but when she spoke again, her eyes didn’t leave his. “I didn’t exactly  _ ask _ to be a...goddess of thunder, you know?” She made a face while she said it, and Clint was sure that if he suddenly became a Tesla coil one day, he’d make a face about it, too. “I was perfectly happy in Greece, tanning and drinking mojitos and helping Jane with her research...and now I’m…” Her sentence trailed off, white teeth worrying the plush pink of her bottom lip.

“The Human Taser?” he smiled, and something clenched in his gut when she smiled, too.

“Tony likes to be dramatic and tell me that it’s actually illegal to pick my own superhero name.”

“Tell me about it. I was  _ supposed _ to be ‘the Golden Archer,’ but some asshole in the old IT department was a big fan of M*A*S*H, so...Hawkeye.”

She looked at him incredulously, the smile still not leaving her lips. “M*A*S*H. Seriously?”

He punched her gently in the knee. “No. But it’s a good story, isn’t it?”

She opened her mouth to answer him, but a sharp sting echoed in his head - his hearing aids were screeching, pain blooming behind his eyes -

And something large and dark seemed to drift through the windows, shattering the glass and pitching Clint backwards into darkness.

The last thing he saw was a long, thick streak of blue, and Darcy’s eyes going white.

* * *

The first thing he thought when he woke up, his eyelids too heavy to open and his head too waterlogged and groggy to move, was that Lucky needed to be let outside to shit.

The next thing he thought was that someone’s hand was on the crook of his elbow, but in the daze he couldn’t make out whose hand it was, how big or small, how soft or rough. Just warm.

People were speaking, he could  _ almost _ hear it, like voices muffled through a thick layer of cement. He was almost certain that they were women’s voices, but he also wasn’t sure how many there might have been. And then someone was touching his ear, the room snapping to life with their finger to the dial on his hearing aid.

“Mr. Barton? Can you hear me?” That was Dr. Cho. She’d been working on some kind of regeneration machine on the med level. She and Nat hooked up at Stark’s last holiday party, in the coat closet. “This is Dr. Cho, I’m here with Miss Lewis.”

He tried to move the wrist that was connected to the arm one of them was touching, but it became very heavy very suddenly, the dull numbness telling him it was wrapped tight in something soft - gauze, most likely. His mouth was dry, and trying to make a sound with his throat felt like gargling chalk, but his eyes finally cracked open.

He was in a small cube of the med level, with Darcy seated at his side and Dr. Cho standing above him. Cho removed her hand from his hearing aid.

“Mr. Barton, you and Miss Lewis were attacked by a small squad of HYDRA operatives. They have been neutralized, and the damage you’ve sustained shouldn’t be of any long-term concern. You have a sprained wrist, two bruised ribs, and a concussion, along with minor cuts and bruises. You should be fully recovered in about three weeks.”

“Lucky,” he wheezed, his eyes rolling slowly to meet Darcy’s. “Whereishe?”

She smiled gently, her lips wobbling. “Natasha’s at your place taking care of him. She slept over last night so he wouldn’t be alone.”

“Good.” He felt his whole body sag when he exhaled a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. His middle ached. “You go Human Taser on ‘em?”

She quaked with a small laugh. “Yeah, I went Human Taser.”

“Good shit.” He tried swallowing, just barely wetting his tongue. “You’re gonna have so much paperwork.”

Something sprinkled very lightly on his chest. “Yeah. Yeah, definitely.”

“S’okay.” He closed his eyes, feeling whatever Cho had pumped into his IV start to sneak its way back into his muscles. “Hill’s a big softie...when you get to know her…”

The next time he woke up, his body was a little less immobile and a lot more sore. Felt like he’d been taken down by a dump truck, but it wouldn’t have been the first time. When he opened his eyes, the room was empty. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and tried not to go ass over face when he got his feet under him.

The guy in the mirror looked rough, but not as rough as he felt. The bruises under his eyes had stopped swelling, more yellow than black and blue at this point, and his split lip had already started to scab over.

“Jesus Christ, you look old,” he grumbled, scrubbing a hand through his hair.

“And more useless by the minute.”

Nat had snuck up on him, slinking into the open seat by his bedside while he wasn’t looking. He realized the small stack of gifts on the table next to her, a vase of purple flowers that she was running her hand over.

“How you feeling?” she asked, as she watched him learn to sit down again. “Tony was fuming. One part, I think, because he didn’t see HYDRA coming. Another part because they blew up a bunch of shit he’d been working on. Another part because he doesn’t want you to know he cares. You gettin’ hurt blows that steely billionaire cover of his.”

“I’m sure he’s wipin’ his tears on hundred dollar bills.” He settled back into bed, his uninjured hand probing his bruised ribs. “How’s the Human Taser holdin’ up?”

Natasha smiled. “She told me you brought her coffee. Before you got busted up.”

“I was playin’ nice.” He sucked in a seething breath when he hit a tender spot. “Tryin’ to relate to the kid. Talked about M*A*S*H.”

“It must’ve worked,” Nat said, lifting one of the gifts on his end table and wiggling it at him - it was a strange shape, a tub of rainbow strips taped to a bag of dog treats. “She left you these. Think the Human Taser might just like you back, Barton.”

“Doubt it.” He stared at the ceiling above him; Darcy knew he was just being nice. She liked to tease him, wanted to be kind after a near-death experience together. They were colleagues - saving his ass was part of her job description. “She’s just bein’ nice, too. People tend to get all warm and fuzzy when you’ve been through traumatic shit together.”

Nat reached forward to jiggle his knee teasingly. “Even you and me?”

Clint tried not to laugh too hard, to spare his old man ribs. “Even you and me.”

* * *

After going to visit him after the HYDRA attack, Darcy didn’t see Clint for a little while. She felt like she was punishing herself by shoving her nose in the paperwork over the incident and hanging around Bruce and Tony to help with any of the research that had been lost, but they’d both insisted she continue training with Thor instead of moping over their holoscreens. Natasha Romanoff, in her own interesting way, had tried to make her feel better by dropping into the empty seat next to her in the seventeenth level cafeteria for lunch.

“Hey,” Natasha said, drawing her legs up onto the chair and crossing them under her. Darcy blinked for a second, then swallowed the chunk of apple she’d been chewing on.

“Hey. How, um...how’s it going?”

“Good. Things’ve been relatively quiet since the whole lab...situation.” She moved a piece of macaroni salad around on her plate, never breaking eye contact. “How’s Avenger training going?”

Darcy took a sip of her Yoo-hoo. “Thor’s been super helpful. I  _ feel _ like I’m learning stuff, and the flying’s getting a little bit easier.” She’d stayed off the ground for a total of thirty seconds this morning, reaching a maximum height of twenty-two feet, and managed to land not on her face like she had the last few times she’d been trying. Thor was proud, but Darcy knew her powers still had a long way to go, including learning how to channel the lightning when people  _ weren’t  _ bursting through the windows and attacking her and her friends.

Friend - was that how she would describe Clint? She saw him almost every day before the attack, he’d brought her coffee, she visited his bedside and cried when he woke up. Were they friends because of what HYDRA had done? Was that what being a superhero meant? Only caring about people who also swooped down from the rooftops to address evil head-on?

“Can I ask you something?” she said, pushing her tray away from her. “Do you have any...non-SHIELD friends?”

Natasha offered a sympathetic smile. “This about Thor and Jane?”

Darcy shrugged. “I don’t know. Kind of. She hasn’t seen him in a few years, then suddenly I get all zappy and I get to see him pretty much every day. What happens if I lose my powers? Or if I retire? I just...go back to being ‘normal’?”

“People would like you, with or without your powers, Darcy.” She sounded sure about it, leaning forward as if to share a secret. “Plenty of people already do.”

For some reason, she felt her face go pink. “Is that code for something?”

Natasha’s smile did not waver, and she tucked a few strands of deep red hair behind her ear. “It’s code for, Thor reached out to Jane yesterday because he saw her name pop up on your phone, and Clint is at home today moping over the dog treats you bought Lucky.”

Darcy swallowed again. “One, how do you know that, and two, what’s he got to do with anything?”

“Darcy, it’s my job to know everything about my teammates.” Natasha leaned back in her chair, folding her arms over her chest. “You’re going to get better with your powers. I know that, because you saved my best friend’s life. You’re also not  _ just _ your powers. I know that, because he’s apeshit crazy about you.”

Something big and uncomfortable swooped in Darcy’s stomach. “What?”

“You’re too smart for me to spell it out for you, Lewis.” Natasha pressed a half an index card across the table with an address printed over it in blue ink. “Burn this...when you’re done with it.”

Darcy heard the legs of her chair scraping across the tile before she realized that she was standing, with Clint’s address in her hands and her heart in her throat.

“I - what do I - ”

“Hill won’t mind. Get outta here.”

Darcy dumped her tray in the crates at the corner of the cafeteria, pocketed the note, and pushed through the doors to the corridor, and then the stairwell.

The address Natasha had given her led to an old, somewhat crumbly brownstone in Brooklyn, the apartment building tall and mostly nondescript - the gate at the front swung open before she could ask anyone to buzz her down. Darcy pushed through, repeating his apartment number in her head over and over. 

The doormat in front of Clint’s apartment was very stomped-in, almost obscuring the message on the hard bristles: FUCK OFF. Darcy couldn’t help but smile, and took a deep breath to calm her nerves before lifting her hand to pound on the door. 

When it opened, Clint looked only slightly less beat up than he had the last time she’d seen him. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she said, suddenly very unsure of what to do with her hands. “Can I, um...can I come in?”

One corner of his mouth turned up, and then the next. She had almost forgotten what that broken smile looked like, and at the same time, she couldn’t get it out of her head. 

“Sure.”

**Author's Note:**

> Bigtime thanks to crimtastic, dresupi, and treaddelicately for taking a look at this bad boy for me ;)


End file.
